Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Mimsy Were the Technocrats: As long as we keep talking about it, it’s technology.

Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1928 Frigidaire—Wednesday, December 27th, 2023
The Fruits of Your Frigidaire: Women enjoying the fruits of their Frigidaire refrigerator, from the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes.; refrigerators; Frigidaire

Enjoying the fruits of their Frigidaire.

Since writing Refrigerator Revolution I’ve picked up two other refrigerator cookbook/manuals, and I’ve written a script to scan cookbooks into PDFs. So besides covering three refrigerator manuals (1928, 1942, and 1947) in this series, I’ll also provide searchable downloads of them, so that you can see my sources for yourself.

  1. Frigidaire, 1928
  2. Cold Cooking, 1942
  3. Norge Cold Cookery, 1947

The oldest refrigerator manual in my collection, and the inspiration for this series, is the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB). Like all three of these books, It’s both a manual and a recipe collection. It goes over the basic functions of the refrigerator, such as its dial for adjusting how quickly things freeze and how to defrost.

The Frigidaire book’s subtitle was “Prepared especially for Frigidaire Automatic Refrigerators equipped with the Frigidaire Cold Control.” That’s a very dry description of something you had to see to believe:

The primary purpose of Frigidaire Automatic Refrigeration is to preserve food. In this capacity it is today preventing needless food spoilage and safeguarding health in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the world. But there are many other services which Frigidaire offers.

The delicious frozen desserts and salads which may be prepared with the aid of Frigidaire, represent an entirely new application of the household refrigerator. To understand thoroughly how easily these frozen dishes may be prepared is to value Frigidaire above all other household utilities.

The language reminds me of early home computer manuals, promising a revolutionary appliance that will change the way you live. Like Andy Hertzfeld in Revolution in The Valley, the refrigerator is referred to as a subject without an article. Frigidaire, like Macintosh, is a person, not a thing.

Lazlo Hollyfeld on the electric car—Wednesday, October 11th, 2023

In my last post, I wrote about the problems with current battery technology. Today’s batteries make owning a battery-powered vehicle a huge hassle and limit travel options to nearby destinations—or enforce artificially long travel times. In both cases, they require that the destination be one where electricity is available in sufficient quantities for charging a battery-powered vehicle. Trips to out-of-the-way places become very difficult when you can’t just store extra bottles of your power source in the trunk. Battery-powered vehicles already maximize every spare location as battery space.

Any unforeseen problem—temperature, traffic jam, etc.—runs the risk of draining the battery, leaving the driver stranded, even during daily trips. And there is no obvious way forward: the future of battery-powered vehicles requires a completely new battery technology, and we not only don’t have that technology we don’t even know where it will come from.

I’ve sometimes said that electric cars are basically daily beaters at the cost of a sports car, but that oversells them. As a daily beater they’ve got issues as well; I’ve known several people who have bought electric cars thinking they’d use them to get back and forth to work, do their shopping, all their local driving. All but one of those vehicles have since been replaced with gasoline vehicles. That one is owned by a friend who has a habit of buying cars that need constant attention.

I think, at best, today’s battery-powered vehicles are little more than Sunday drive vehicles. You don’t have to worry about filling up with gas or checking the oil; you don’t have to worry about rush hour, or temperature extremes. It’s a wonderful day, so get in, drive around the countryside for an hour or two, and come home.

When you do have to worry about losing power during a traffic jam, or having less of a charge than you thought you did because it’s too hot or too cold, or the parking lot’s charger is already occupied and you’re late for work, they make a lot less sense. It is absolutely insane that some states are mandating battery-powered vehicles today. They do not make traveling easier when that travel has the purpose of getting to a specific place at a specific time.

But that brings up a not-so-obvious question. Are electric cars really meant to make traveling easier? Let’s, as Lazlo Hollyfeld might say, look at the features of the modern all-electric power source, that is, the modern battery:

What will a useful electric car look like?—Wednesday, October 4th, 2023
White Tesla Roadster: Image of a Tesla Roadster, March 18, 2015, from Zobeid Zuma. Public Domain.; Tesla Motors; automobiles; cars

This is a beautiful car. EVs are an amazing feat of technology. But they’re currently a lot like Samuel Johnson’s walking dog. It’s amazing it walks, but it’s not done well. That’s mostly because battery technology isn’t up to the needs of motorists.

Electric cars that work are potential game-changers for personal transportation. Never having to worry about hitting the gas station in the morning—because your vehicle’s “tank” automatically refills overnight. Using the same system to power accessories as is used to power the vehicle’s motion. Redundancy for the electrically powered accessories so that one dead battery doesn’t shut down the vehicle—as currently happens when a modern gas vehicle’s one battery dies.

All-electric vehicles even today have advantages. Acceleration is immediate: the direct link between power source and motive force makes changes in speed happen faster, making electric cars more maneuverable and thus potentially safer. This advantage, however, is held back by the mass requirements of both modern battery packs and current safety regulations. Heavier vehicles are less maneuverable.

One big problem is that what we call an electric vehicle is a misnomer. Our “electric” vehicles run off of chemical batteries. Our current battery technology is designed for far less strenuous tasks than the special needs of transporting large masses over long distances. I am increasingly of the opinion that when we finally get useful batteries for cars, their technology will be so different from current technology that we won’t even call them batteries.

Gasoline, after all, is a battery. It stores energy for later use, and in a very concentrated form.1 Gasoline is far more powerful and efficient for moving vehicles than our current electro-chemical batteries. Even in my giant old American car, a full tank of gas weighs a little over a hundred pounds, and this amount drops as the gas provides energy. Battery packs in cars weigh a thousand pounds or more, a thousand pounds that not only can’t go as far as my hundred pounds, but does not weigh less as it produces energy.

If I tricked out my trunk to hold a thousand pounds of gasoline in my car, I could go well over 3,000 miles without a refill. And it would probably still take less time to refill for another 3,000 miles than it does to refill an EV for another 300. That’s how efficient gasoline is compared to modern batteries.

A disappointing COVID Summer of Death—Wednesday, April 12th, 2023
Methicillin-resistant Staph bacteria: “Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (yellow) and a dead human white blood cell (colored red.)” From the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)/NIH, June 30, 2006.; antibiotics; bacteria

An antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, from the already-existing (and probably valid) scare campaign against the overuse of antibiotics.

I saw a very strange and telling rant by a friend on the left about a year ago, comparing COVID vaccines to antibiotics. There are a lot of very clueless things on the internet not worth commenting on because they’re little more than gibberish, and I kept putting this post off because separating the gibberish from the interesting parts was painful.1

But his rant about antibiotics highlights three very important facets of how the left works, how they treat science, politics, and the new hate.

My friend’s post suggests that we need to start a campaign to make those hesitant to take the COVID vaccine also hesitate to take antibiotics.

I’m all about aiming an anti-antibiotic campaign tailored straight for the anti-vaxers. Use their words, make them imagine themselves heroes set upon in an egregious age, and let them die of a routine infection. Not so much murder as assisted suicide, and for the greater good.

He wants the unvaccinated to die. The arguments that he suggests would make the COVID vaccine hesitant also stop taking antibiotics include:

Antibiotics are Anti-Life

It’s right there in the name! And that’s only ONE of the reasons people should avoid antibiotics:

2. You need to be careful what you put in your body.

7. People give cows antibiotics, and just look at them. Fuckin’ herd animals.

The most obviously fascinating aspect of his plan is that I’ve seen all of these arguments before. These points are already used by the medical community. He doesn’t seem cognizant of the already-existing campaign against the use of antibiotics by doctors and health professionals. Do a search on “antibiotic overuse” and you’ll find just what he’s suggesting—but against everyone, not just those hesitant to take the COVID vaccine. That is, many in the medical community already think we are abusing antibiotics.

Our Cybernetic Future 2023: Entropy in Action—Wednesday, February 15th, 2023
Keyser Söze: Entropy doesn’t exist: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that entropy doesn’t exist.”; Kevin Spacey; entropy

When I was growing up, a standard response taught by parents to young children was “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

I doubt parents still teach that. There are a lot of assumptions in that advice that are no longer safe, notably that it won’t be taken as a challenge. The assumption then was that verbal exchanges remained verbal exchanges. Nowadays the assumption is that knifing a fellow student in the back is merely standard schoolyard play.

That was seriously said by the West Side Left, back in 2021.

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers.

Their logic in letting kids knife kids would be perfectly understandable to Norbert Wiener. Yes, young teenagers have engaged in deadly fights for eons. It was hard work bringing our culture out of the barbarism of child violence. But there is a growing contingent today that doesn’t just want to ignore that without work we get barbarism, they welcome the slide backward into barbarism, even to the point of supporting kids knifing kids.

Without work, entropy always wins.

In part one, I highlighted John G. Kemeny’s argument that the proper relationship between man and machine in the age of the computer is a collaborative one with man in control. In part two I examined Vannevar Bush’s prescient vision of a networked future in which scientific discoveries would be readily available to all, ensuring that science and technology would always advance to the benefit of mankind rather than being lost in dusty libraries. And in part three I added Norbert Wiener’s warnings that entropy applies to communications—especially networked communications—just as it applies to physics.

What can we learn from these three visionaries more than half a century on?

Our Cybernetic Future 1954: Entropy and Anti-Entropy—Wednesday, December 14th, 2022
Chesterton: No machine can lie: “No machine can lie,” said Father Brown, “nor can it tell the truth.”—G.K. Chesterton; G. K. Chesterton; computer logic

Having dealt with someone at the far cusp of the personal computer revolution, and someone at its conception, I’d like to look at someone in between. Like Vannevar Bush1, Norbert Wiener did not use personal computers. They didn’t exist. Nor was there anything remotely like the Internet. But it was the Internet’s potential for degrading human communication that frightened him. Or, more generally, the vast speed-up of the coming communications technology divorced from any acknowledgment that communication is always subject to degradation and that progress is not natural.

Norbert Wiener feared a faster and faster world with less and less content, because of a culture that more and more denies the existence of entropy. Entropy originated as a term from physics, for the level of disorder and randomness in a system. It’s the second law of thermodynamics, which, in simpler terms, means that everything tends toward disorder. Order requires that some form of work be added to the system. You can think of entropy as a measure of how jumbled up a jigsaw puzzle is. But the universe is not just a jigsaw puzzle that must be put back together—applying work to reduce the entropy in the puzzle. The universe is a jigsaw puzzle that continually falls apart, as if it were on a glass table in an earthquake. Work is required not just to keep it from getting more disordered, but to keep it from mixing up with the table, too.

Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society in 1954. What Wiener wanted to bring to public attention was the meaning of life, communication, and being human in a world where communications and computers were speeding up just as Vannevar Bush had promised us they would. New forms of communication would soon connect far more people for far more uses than previously imaginable.

Norbert Wiener was one of the founders, if not the founder, of the field of Cybernetics. He defined Cybernetics as:

Our Cybernetic Future 1945: As We May Blog—Wednesday, November 30th, 2022
Vannevar Bush: Logical processes: Vannevar Bush: Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.; programming; computer logic; Vannevar Bush

In 1945, Vannevar Bush told us our future: fast computers attached to powerful networks, enabling nearly unimaginable individual creativity and research; and even more importantly, communications both with other people and with the vast wealth of human knowledge. As We May Think is possibly the most influential essay in the history of both science fiction and computers. I’m almost surprised that we didn’t name computers “memexes” given how influential As We May Think was in science fact and fiction.

There are two aspects of this very famous and influential essay: what was happening, and what was going to happen, both the growth of knowledge and the advancement of computer science. Vannevar Bush didn’t use terminology we’re familiar with. It didn’t exist. The title of the essay was meant literally: he predicted that our thinking would change in the future. He predicted a hybrid, cyborg future, offloading repetitive thought to automated processes, and naturally integrating automated knowledge retrieval into the way we think on a daily basis.

As someone who can no longer remember anything without keeping my phone on hand, I resemble that vision.

“There is a growing mountain of research…” Bush wrote, and “we are being bogged down today as specialization extends…”. Important research had always run the risk of obscurity, and it was only getting worse.

Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

Our Cybernetic Future 1972: Man and Machine—Wednesday, November 16th, 2022
John Kemeny: symbiote: “…the most important event was the coming of man-machine interaction… within the last generation man has acquired an important symbiote.”; programming for all; John G. Kemeny

I’m dividing my promised sequel to Future Snark into three parts, one each for three very smart views of a future that became our present. These are the anti-snark to that installment’s snark: Vannevar Bush (1945), Norbert Wiener (1954), and John G. Kemeny (1972). I was going to title it “Snark and Anti-Snark” to extend the Toffler joke further than it ought to go. But these installments are not snark about failed predictions. These are futurists whose predictions were accompanied by important insights into the nature of man and computer, what computerization and computerized communications mean for our culture, and what responsibilities we have as consumers and citizens within a computerized and networked society.

These authors understood the relationship between man and computer, before the personal computer existed. Their predictions were sometimes strange, but their vision of how that relationship should be handled embodied important truths we must not forget. Their views of our cybernetic future focus heavily on not just the interaction between user and machine but on the relationship between computerization and humanity in general.

Surviving the ongoing computer and communications revolution requires understanding that relationship.

I’m going to handle these authors in reverse order, starting with John G. Kemeny. Kemeny published Man and the Computer in 1972. If Kemeny’s name sounds familiar, you might recognize “Kemeny and Kurtz” as the developers of the BASIC programming language. Much of this book, while it wasn’t designed as such, is an explanation of why BASIC is what it is—a unique programming language unmatched even today as an interactive dialogue between the user and the computer. Unlike most programming languages—including BASIC itself on modern computers—Kemeny’s BASIC didn’t require creating programs in order to get the computer to do stuff. The same commands that could be entered into a computer program could be typed directly to the computer with an immediate response.

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